vrijdag 1 juli 2016

Priest Jozef Brusten

For a long time I wanted to dedicate an additional blog post to Priest Jozef Brusten. After all I have learned about him, I think it's safe to conclude that this was a righteous man who lived to help and serve others. His story is an emotional one to tell...

Some additional pictures and information about Jozef can be found here.

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While the previous post already mentioned the different prisoner camps to which Jozef was taken during WWII, I wanted to share some more background on the reasons of his arrest and the conditions he had to endure during his imprisonment...The reason why Jozef had been arrested was because someone had informed the Gestapo that Jozef had helped a Jewish man to hide from the nazi's. After being kept for a while in the prison of Liège, Jozef was deported, together with eighteen other prisoners to Grob Strehlitz (now Strzelce Opolskie in Poland). There he had to conduct really hard labour like building barracks and working in the quarries while he was beaten on a daily basis by the guards who were often German prisoners also carrying an inmate number on their backs. The beatings were so severe that numerous prisoners were beaten to death on a daily basis.The transport to the concentration camp Grob Rosen in 1944 happened by train. Of the aproximately one thousand men that were put on that train, eight hundred never returned home. When Grob Rosen was cleared, Jozef was transported again, this time with approximately four thousand other men, to the Nordhausen concentration camp in horrific circumstances. The transport took four days and none of the prisoners received anything to eat or drink. By the time the train arrived, about two thousand people had died...In Nordhausen, many prisoners were executed by shooting them or by letting them starve to death. Nordhausen was deliberated by the 104th "Timberwolf" U.S. Infantry Division after Private John Galione had found a secret tunnel. Amongst the few surviving prisoners was Jozef, however, he only lived for two more years as he died on August 5, 1947. No doubt the horrors he had endured in the two years of his captivity had demanded too much of his health...